Tutorial

Patreon WordPress Membership

Make an Easy Membership Site with WordPress and Patreon

2/6/2018 / Tech, Tutorial, Videos / , , ,

This week I wrote about how I’m doubling down on Patreon to deliver more quality content to my backers. Well, things have just gotten a lot easier for me, because their timing is impeccable.

Patreon has recently release a WordPress plugin that allows you to take posts on your blog and make them viewable to Patrons only. This allows us to make membership sites quickly and easily, without having to worry about processing payments or subscriptions. In this video tutorial, I show you exactly how to make a Patreon WordPress Membership Site.

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heres how to give a good conference talk

5 Steps to Giving a Great Conference Talk

8/24/2017 / Thoughts, Tutorial / , , , ,

When Steve Jobs presented the iPhone for the first time, he didn’t get up on stage and say, “Hey this is an iPhone.” Instead, he told a story – specifically the story of Apple. He built up the iPhone in terms that people understood. This made for an excellent presentation. It sucked people in, it made them invested in what it was talking about, and ultimately, he announced the iPhone to huge cheers. Steve Jobs knew how to give a great presentation.

Now, I’ve been speaking in front of people for a long time. My first on stage performance was at 7 years old, when I was in 2nd grade. I love being in front of people, whether I’m acting, teaching, or just talking. But giving a good conference presentation takes practice. After professionally speaking for almost 10 years, I know what works and what needs work. Here are my 5 steps to putting together a good conference talk. 

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Migrating WordPress Multisite from Media Temple to SiteGround

12/21/2016 / Tech, Tutorial / , , , , ,

A few years ago, I wrote about domain mapping using WordPress Multisite on Media Temple. This year, I’ve been consolidating all of my hosted websites to a single SiteGround account and the very Multisite instance I wrote about needed to be moved over. I had been avoiding it but the time had come, especially since I was getting knocked for $50/month just for those sites. Here’s how I did it.
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Deleting 3 Million Spam Comments from a WordPress Database

12/12/2016 / Code, Tech, Tutorial / , , , ,

Over at the Crowd Favorite blog, I wrote up a post about an interesting problem I solved recently. I laid out everything you need to know there, but it involves downloading a HUGE database and putting WP-CLI to good use. If you haven’t used it before and you do development with WordPress, it’s super valuable. Anyway, check out the post – it’s a good one!

Deleting 3 Million Spam Comments from Your WordPress Database

How to Build Better Web Pages in WordPress

4/4/2016 / Speaking, Tutorial / , , , , ,

When I was creating the website for my new project WP in One Month, I wanted to make sure the home page was diverse with content, different sections, and a lot of information. As a WordPress developer, I could have built a completely custom page template with custom fields for each section, and I could have made use of one of the many plugins to do that. However, I also wanted to get the site up and running quickly. I was pivoting the business and wanted to focus more on executing ideas than on developing the website (I know many developers can relate to me here). I opted instead to build a simple child theme from the theme Ward and use a page building plugin called Beaver Builder. It saved me literally hours of development and gives me lots of flexibility.

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WordPress Database Encoding & the Case of Disappearing Widgets

12/23/2015 / Quick Tips, Tech, Tutorial / , , , ,

Recently I was updating the widgets on my homepage to promote the new WP in One Month. I decided to do so with the logo and a caption, making Jetpack’s Image Widget the perfect candidate. I uploaded the logo, added a title, then copy and pasted the text from the website’s ‘Jumbotron’ area for the caption. I clicked ‘Save’ and something strange happened: all of the Image Widgets, everywhere on my site, disappeared. I tried to do the same thing with a Text Widget, thinking maybe there’s a bug in Jetpack’s Image Widget or it doesn’t allow certain text/markup. After going through the same steps and clicking ‘Save’ every Text Widget on the site disappeared. I decided (really, was forced) to do some investigating.

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Draw Cherries using HTML5 Canvas

2/27/2015 / Tutorial / , , , , ,

I’m teaching a class on 2D Animation this semester and opted to use web technologies such as HTML5 Canvas, CSS Transitions, and Javascript. In this tutorial we are going to use the canvas element to draw 2 cherries with stems. I’m having my class use CodePen for their assignments, so this tutorial kind of assumes that. If you want to see the final product, head on over here.
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